KNOTS LANDING Episode 091 of 344: RECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES

The Plot (Courtesy of TV.Com):Abby and
Westmont scramble to get Apolune off of real estate documents. The audit goes
well and Gary apologizes to Abby. Gary sees that Cathy makes much more than the
other ranch hands, and that they are dated from
before he met her. Gary hires a detective who says Cathy spent the last four years
in prison. Ben and Mack discover that Apolune owns all the property at Lotus Point
except for Abby and Karen's apartment. They think Apolune is a front for
Wolfbridge. Greg and Laura sleep together. Karen suffers from withdrawal. Gary
goes to see her and says if he could get through it, she can. Karen is outraged
that he would compare her plight with his alcoholism. Karen finally opens up in
group. Karen's therapist wants Mack in on her therapy too. Mack feels they're
ganging up on him. Ben tells Val to tell people that the baby is Gary's, as
he's tired of everyone bugging him about it, and he wants to be free of her.

Welcome back.Lately, I’ve started to become fond of
providing some context for how many episodes and what particular episodes My
Beloved Grammy and I watch in a given visit.We’ve reached a very comfortable spot that should last for many, many
years where each disk has five episodes on it.As far as I can recall, it stays this way until the series ends, with
the only exceptions being the last couple of episodes in a season that has an
episode count not divisible by five.But, for now, we’ve got season five, which has 25 episodes, and then
seasons six, seven, and eight all have 30 episodes each.So, for a long time into the future, we shall
always watch five eps per visit, and I like it that way.It’s not just the fact that I want to watch KL and that five episodes makes me
happy, but I feel there’s something about that number that just works. If we watched more than that, I think I would
struggle to remember all the proceedings and exciting events, and if we watched
less than that, I feel I would leave less satisfied.In any case, Reconcilable Differences marked the first of five eps we watched
upon our last visit, spanning through High Ideals.So just know that this was
our first one and it brought us back into the world of KL and I had my big beer and some spicy chicken teriyaki while
starting it up and was all ready for a night of excitement and joy on the
cul-de-sac.

Karen’s pill problem has been
escalating and we’ve been spending a lot of time on it for the last batch of
episodes.It spanned all the way through
our last disk and I believe the first inklings of her starting to take too many
pills was introduced on the disk before, so that’s something like ten or twelve
episodes altogether.I feel like the
main thing Reconcilable Differences wants
to do is sorta finish up this storyline so that we can move on to new business
and, much like the way they handled the demise of Chip Roberts a few episodes
back, I feel the timing is pretty much perfect, because if this stretched on
much longer, it would run the risk of becoming tiresome.The writers always seem to be good about
knowing when it’s time to get a storyline finished up.Even so, I confess I might have some, GASP, criticisms about this episode and the
way it handled the Karen storyline.Read
on.

See, we open on Mack and
Karen in her little rehab hospital, sitting in her room, and Mack is rocking a
fabulous leather jacket that he keeps around for, I think, the rest of the
season and maybe even some seasons more.Seriously, he looks like Fonzie, kinda ridiculous, but I love Mack so
I’m not criticizing.I also feel sorry
for Mack at this juncture because, with nearly a year of marriage to Karen
under his belt, things just don’t seem to be going his way.However, the title of the episode gives me
hope; can Mack and Karen figure out their reconcilable differences and manage
to move on?Let’s find out.

Karen looks in better condition
at the start of this episode than she has in the last few weeks, but it doesn’t
take long for us to see that she’s still dealing with a problem.Early in the episode we see her begging a
nurse for some pills to take the edge off, insisting that she only needs
one.In fact, she even goes so far as to
say that she’ll pay the nurse for them (fifty dollars!), but the nurse has
ethics and remains strong in them, refusing to give Karen anything at all.Karen’s timing is bad, by the way, because at
that precise moment that she starts offering money to the nurse, Eric comes
into the room to visit her, and there’s an uncomfortable quiet moment where
Karen seems to realize someone’s watching this display of obvious addiction and
then turns slowly around to face her son.However, one thing I appreciated is that this doesn’t explode into some
big drama; instead they awkwardly hug and start to exchange chit chat about how
things are going.We all know that Eric
saw this and we know that Karen knows he saw it, but much like real life, the
two just proceed along and sorta try to ignore that anything happened, and it
has that fabulously awkward ring of truth to it.A solid little scene.

I’m not so sure about another
scene that comes just a few minutes later.In it, Karen is lying in the hospital bed, draped in creepy gothic
shadow, thrashing around wildly and screaming and clearly just not having a
good time at all.The music is
fantastically frightening and coming straight out of a horror movie, and then
Karen jumps up and screams and continues her thrashing while a nurse comes in
to make sure everything is all right.We
get the sense that Karen’s withdrawal is making her crazy in more ways than
one, that she is becoming confused about what precisely is going on in her life
and where she is, because she starts screaming, “Where is my daughter?!Where have you taken her?!”I guess she’s also wondering why Claudia Lonow continues to be shown in the scrolling squares at the head of the
episodes when she has sat out now four episodes in a row (spoiler alert: She’ll
be back in the next one), but anyway, that’s what she’s screaming.

We
get some intense close-ups of Karen’s anguished face, her eyes getting all big
and wild, her mouth stretching out.It’s
not a bad scene, but I guess I feel it’s maybe a little….much?I mean, hell, maybe I’m wrong.I’ve lived a very blessed life and have never
suffered from addiction and have never had anyone close to me suffer from
addiction, so I’ve never had to go to a rehab center and see someone going
through a detox.For all I know, it
could be as extreme as this or even more, but there’s just something about the
scene that felt a little over-the-top to me.Is it my beloved Michele?Mmmm,
maybe.After giving her criticism for getting
a little hammy at the start of the season, I then felt she was improving nicely
and was quite impressive during our last batch of eps as she dealt with the
onslaught of her pill addiction, but now I think she’s back to being a bit too
much.Make no mistake, I still love her
and always will (and yes, she’s still my favorite character on the series), but
I just feel this scene isn’t quite as good as it could be.

Next
up is a visit from Gary.This scene
moved me and touched me and made me feel very sad all at once, because Gary is
coming to Karen as a friend and as someone who understands her, but my
sphincter tightened up as the scene started because I knew, I just knew that Karen would be unwilling to
listen to him and unable to handle the fact that her addictions are the same as
his addictions and I didn’t want to watch her be hurtful to Gary, who is
shaping up into quite a man this year and is coming to be her supporter.Things unfolded as I expected them to,
because he starts to tell stories about how, when he was drinking, no matter
what was going on in his life, the only thing he cared about was finding that next
drink.Karen flips out and screams about
how she is not like him, saying, “You are a drunk!” and she says it with such venom, as if it makes Gary less
than human, and it was all rather painful to watch.Unlike the last scene, which I was kinda
complaining about, I’m complimenting this scene.These are complex characters; they are
neither black nor white and they are not only allowed to be consistently great
people or consistently bad people.At
her core, Karen is a good person, but she’s got herself into a bad situation
and it’s making her be ugly and nasty to the people who love her.One thing that I found especially moving in
the scene was that Gary does not get upset; he just calmly gets up and leaves
the rehab center.Watching this, I
realized it’s because Gary knows where she’s coming from and that, really, it’s
not Karen that’s yelling at him, it’s her addictions.

Let’s
take a break from Karen for a minute to discuss Gary and what he’s up to this
episode.Well, for one thing, he finds
out that Val is pregnant, thanks to an even-less-discreet-than-usual Lilimae,
who runs into him in the hallway of the rehab center.Rather than exchanging superfluous
pleasantries and then going about her business, Lilimae sorta follows after
Gary and is like, “Val is dating Ben Gibson and he’s super duper nice and
really sexy and he fucks Val good and Val says his wiener is bigger than yours,
so what do you think of that?”Gary just
sorta nods and accepts this bizarre and awkward bit of conversation from Lilimae,
who then just flat out states, “And Val is pregnant with Ben’s baby.”Hmmm, didn’t Val ask her just a few episodes
ago not to tell anybody about this?Of
course, after that Lilimae immediately ran to Ben’s Plant House to give him
fatty foods and talk about the pregnancy, but I’m willing to forgive that one
because I think she just assumed he already knew about it.With Gary, though, it’s different, and really
rather tactless of Lilimae (who I still love, don’t get me wrong) to just go on
and blurt out this private information that Val asked her to keep secret,
although I suppose it’s possible that
there was some offscreen scene between Val and Lilimae in which she gave her
mama permission to tell people, though that seems highly unlikely to me at this
point.

Remember
how in our last ep, Gary announced that he was going to do an audit on Gary
Ewing Enterprises?Well, thanks to some
clever finagling that I’m still not quite sure I understand, Abs manages to
transfer money from somewhere or something like that and make the books balance
okay so that, when the auditor comes, they pass just fine.The only problem, however, is that after the
audit Gary notices that Cathy is getting paid way more per month than she’s supposed
to (I think he says something like a thousand a month, though I could be
mistaken).The plot thickens when he is
told that she is being paid by Abs, not by him, and the plot thickens ever more
when he learns that Cathy has been receiving these checks since before he ever met her on that fateful
honeymoon night in the hotel suite.Now
that he’s a wise and sober man, Gary starts to go to work getting to bottom of
this little mystery for himself.

Gary
is very clever here and both My Beloved Grammy and I are very pleased to see
him climbing out of that awful bender from last season and becoming not just
clearheaded, but pretty sharp, too.See,
he’s talking to Abs a little later and he just casually mentions how he’s
thinking of firing Cathy, just testing to see how Abs will react.Naturally, rather than being like, “Sure,
fire her, whatever, I don’t care,” which is what Abs would probably really say if this mysterious Ciji
doppelganger showed up in Gary’s life for no clear reason and became the object
of his obsessions, Abs gets all protective of Cathy and is like, “But Gary, you
said yourself that she’s one of the best workers and I think you should keep
her!”After this little bit of defense,
Gary starts to see what’s going on here.

The
last interesting Cathy revelation within this episode comes when Gary goes to visit some private investigator guy he had hired to do some snooping.The investigator tells Gary that Cathy’s last
known residence was not a house or an apartment, but rather, oh my God, a
prison.Now what on earth can this mean?What was Cathy doing in a prison?In addition to that, the prison is nowhere
near the area Cathy claims to have come from (I think she claims to have come
from Wisconsin or something and the prison is in Arkansas, or maybe it’s
flipped around the other way, or maybe I’m wrong about both places).Anyway, the basic gist of it is that Gary is
starting to realize Cathy has been lying to him about a ton of things, but why?

How
about things on the Val/Ben front?Well,
they’re still not seeing each other at the moment, but currently only Mack and
Ben know the real reason, that Val is carrying Gary’s love-child/children.This is making life hard for Val, but one
good thing does happen to her this week, which is that she learns her second
manuscript has been accepted.After the
big splash of Capricorn Crude, now
she can make an even bigger splash with Nashville
Junction.I must say I like the very
natural progression of Val’s career.If
we go all the way back to some really early episode in season one (it feels so
far away now that I can’t even remember what episode it was, but I think think think it was The Constant Companion), we learned that Val felt inferior for
never having completed high school, so she was studying to get her G.E.D.She succeeded at that and then spent season
two going to college and taking writing courses (including that gloriously
uncomfortable writing class where The Other Paul Rudd showed up as a substitute
teacher and took a big shit all over her story).Okay, then in season three we learned that
she was working on a big story of her own, a kinda fiction/non-fiction story based on
her experiences with the Texas Ewings.That came out in season four and made a big splash and turned her into a
successful author and now here we are in season five and her second manuscript
is being accepted for publication.Again, if this were Melrose Place,
Val would randomly decide out of the blue one day that she wants to become an
author and then she would have a published book an episode or two later. KL is
so much better at letting these things gradually unfold organically over time.

I
don’t think this episode is as well directed or edited as I’m getting used to
at this juncture in the series, when every episode seems to be this amazingly
stylish art film and we are getting solidly consistent and yet uniquely
different work from such standouts as Nicholas Sgarro, Larry Elikann, or Bill “You Know What I Like About This Car? The Price” Duke.I mean, it’s not
a big thing, but I just feel like this one is a little sloppier than usual, and
a good example is a scene taking place in Ben’s Plant House.We get a quick stock exterior shot of The
Plant House and then cut inside and Lilimae is, like, in the middle of ranting
to Ben.How did she get in here?Obviously something was cut out, right?The problem is that I can easily tell
something was cut, and I feel the cut, and there were no clever tricks done to
make the cut less noticeable or a little more stylish; instead the scene just
starts and Lilimae is just, kinda, um, there.I recognized the name of this ep’s director, Sheldon Larry (pictured below), and I knew I
had seen it before, but a glance at his IMDb shows that he only directs two KL eps, with the other one being a
little earlier in this season with …And Never Brought to Mind.I’m trying to
flashback to that one and I’m sure I enjoyed it just fine, but I also don’t
seem to recall any cool stylistic flourishes or touches, so maybe there’s a
reason Mr. Larry only directs two eps while so many of our other directors seem
to be invited back time and time again over the course of years (indeed, I am
pleased to announce that Bill “Cooke” Duke will be the man behind the camera
for our very next episode).

This
episode has one very significant development that gave me a very significant KL boner, and that is the relationship
of Laura and Greg.So far as I can
remember, we’ve only had one scene with the two of them alone together up to
this point (the fabulous scene in Greg’s limo in which he made Laura laugh and
smile and she was trying to hide it from him), but this episode really speeds
up the proceedings with them.Again, my
memories from my first watch are proving inaccurate, because I didn’t think
Laura and Greg shagged until well into season six, but it happens right here in
this episode.See, he comes to visit the
office and Laura is the only one there and they start to make some chit chat
and then he, um, smells her neck.I
guess this is supposed to be sexy, and I suppose it would be if it was
happening in real life and if you felt some electric chemistry with the person
doing it to you (and I do confess I find Devane kinda sexy, though certainly
not
the Michael-Fairgate-I-want-to-immediately-fuck-the-shit-out-of-him-and-then-come-right-back-for-seconds
type of sexy), but it came off as a smidge creepy for me. In
any case, it must work for Laura because the very next time we see them, they
are in bed together.This was done in a
nice way, in which Laura receives a phonecall and we start in a closeup of her
sitting up in bed.Of course, the
closeup was so tight that I immediately called out what was going to happen,
and I was right; the camera pans out a bit and there’s naked Sumner lying in
bed next to her.Ah, what a fabulous
development, though maybe, like my overall criticisms of this episode, moving a
smidge too fast?

Speaking
of moving too fast, after one night of thrashing around and looking like ass,
Karen appears to be doing much better.At first I wasn’t sure what to make of this, if perhaps we were supposed
to infer that she was being kinda manic and way too “look how healthy I’m
feeling today!”But no, I don’t think
so, I think the drugs are working their way out of her system and she really
does feel better, but still, a bit sudden.Anyway, there’s a conflict going on between Karen and Mack in this
episode in which he feels uncomfortable with the counseling session that she
takes him to and then they have a little argument in the hallway where she
tells him he needs to come to her with his problems so they can work them out
and he says, “You don’t listen!”This is
a good scene with fantastic acting from both Michele and The Dobsonator,
definitely no complaints here.Even if
Karen’s detox is maybe moving a little fast for me, I am always enthralled by
these two and their relationship and I want them to be happy and work things
out because I love them.

The
time comes for Karen to be done with the program and leave the hospital.However, probably due to nervous feelings
about returning home to where her problems started, she starts trying to
postpone it, saying how she should stay another day and see what the doctor
thinks before she leaves.This is an
interesting inversion to how much she wanted to get out of here in the last
episode; in that case she was scared and angry and felt she had only her pills
to help her, but now she is afraid to leave this hospital that has become
something of a safe haven for her.Even
so, Mack tells her that the program is over and it’s time for her to go home,
and he’s speaking rather curtly, almost angrily, but then he says, “You’ll be
back for counseling sessions, and I’ll be there with you.”This is a sweet moment because Karen sees
that, even if Mack is uncomfortable with these sessions, he is going to keep
coming with her to be her supporter.

I
really liked the very last scene of the episode because I found it tremendously
moving and, broken record alert here, very well acted.Also, we get a callback to Mack’s dad.This excited me not because I particularly like Mack’s dad (you’ll
recall that The Block Partywas my
least favorite episode of the otherwise brilliant season four), but because I
was quite convinced he vanished into the sky without ever being mentioned again
by Mack or anyone else for the rest of the series.Nope, I was wrong, for here we are with Mack
speaking to his good old drunken Irish dad on the phone (offscreen, but still,
we know he’s talking to the dude).

Anyway,
Karen comes wandering into the kitchen while Mack is talking and she overhears
his conversation and, I think, finally realizes what kind of stress and
pressure Mack has been under this last year and, specifically, these last few
months.The most moving part is that we
hear Mack answering his dad’s question about how Karen is doing, and he lies
and says, “Karen is the rock of Gibraltar; I couldn’t go through anything
without her.”When the conversation is
over, and Mack still thinks he’s alone in the kitchen, he hangs up the phone
and sorta leans against the kitchen table and starts to hyperventilate and cry
a little bit, just overwhelmed with everything going on in his life (remember
that he just got dropped from Greg’s
crime commission due to weird and mysterious allegations).At this point, Karen goes into the kitchen
and Mack turns around, and he lets the tears fall right down his face, and the
two embrace together and he cries into Karen’s shoulder and boom, that’s our
final scene of the episode, and a pretty damn good way to go out.

All
that said, though, I’m gonna have to say this is the weakest ep of the season
so far aside from maybe our premiere, The People vs. Gary Ewing.Make no
mistake, it’s not bad in anyway, but I just had some problems with the way a
few things were cut and edited together and I thought the direction lacked the
usual KL flair that I’ve come to
expect now.Also, and most importantly
for me, it just felt a little fast in almost all regards.This might be the result of this being the
first episode on our disk, if that makes any sense.Like, if this had been the last episode on our previous disk after
spending so much time watching Karen struggle with her pills, it might have
played differently, but hopping back in with a fresh new disk and having her
problems seem to be solved so fast (I think, quite literally, overnight) rang
a bit false to me.

Okay,
let me backtrack a bit.It’s not that
her problems are solved overnight, since she struggled with addiction for a
good long chunk of episodes and since she and Mack are still gonna have some
relationship work to do because of this.It’s mostly the fact that, within the confines of this episode, we get one scene of her having a nightmare and
flailing around in bed and acting all crazy and then, next time we see her,
she’s better and she’s acting like her normal self.Perhaps this really is how it works when you
detox a drug, I dunno, but it just rang a bit false for me.Similarly, while I’m glad to see Laura and
Greg shag, it sure did come about fast, didn’t it?One little sniff of her neck and boom,
they’re in the sack. Even
so, it’s KL and I love KL and this season has been dynamite so
far and, if I wasn’t taking all the time to write these essays and notice all
the details of the episodes, this one would have come and gone and I probably
wouldn’t have even noticed it was weaker than prior episodes.It’s only because I’m looking at these under
such a microscope now that I see more flaws in this one.

But
the good news is that it’s all uphill, as the next four episodes on our disk
were fucking tremendous, so let’s move right along to our next one, the aptly
titled Second Chances.

3 comments:

I agree with your assessment of Karen's withdrawals. To me, it wasn't that the acting was bad, it was just predictable. That is what you EXPECT someone in withdrawal to act like. And as you mentioned earlier, Knots was so great because it wasn't predictable (e.g. Neither Karen nor Eric commenting on her trying to bribe the nurse). But in 14 seasons, Michele can't ALWAYS be perfect :)

About Me

I live in Seattle, Washington and am a recent college graduate who is currently stuck in a retail hole, but working to get out of it. My interests lie in reading, writing, editing, and proofreading. I love movies and television and I obviously have a very special love for KNOTS LANDING, because I have created an entire blog devoted to it. Feel free to comment on my blog or leave me an E-Mail anytime you want and I promise to get back to you.